An early/mid 1960’s NASA film about the design of the Apollo hardware. Includes simple schematics of both Direct mission hardware as well as Lunar Orbit Rendezvous hardware; also visible are more detailed diagrams of Apollo and Apollo-derived designs.
So I’ve gotten word that my book “Boeing B-47 Stratojet & B-52 Stratofortress: Origins and Evolution” has been received by some people who bought it on Amazon. But so far, there has been only a single review posted there. If you purchased a copy from Amazon and have received it, I would appreciate it if you could rate and/or review it.
And if you purchased “Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird: Origins and Evolution,” why not rate and review it as well? I mean, come on… this sample of uranium ore has more than 1,400 reviews.
I honestly can’t explain this.
An attempted coup in Belarus? If it fails… well…
Lukashenka committed treason – he made our country a participant in the invasion of Ukraine. So I declared myself as the national leader of Belarus to protect the sovereignty & independence of our country, represent it in security negotiations & crisis management in the region. pic.twitter.com/IyQ0YOM7Kf
— Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya (@Tsihanouskaya) February 26, 2022
Welcome to California under Bidenomics:
That’s the *cheap* stuff.
Just wait until China invades Taiwan under the watchful eye of President BidenHarris. We will *all* get to enjoy the glory of ten-dollar-a-gallon gas as the economy grinds to a long-term halt.
A recent acquisition is this Grumman general arrangement diagram of the EA-6B “Prowler” electronic warfare aircraft. It’s about three feet wide and fifteen feet long, and has been stored folded for many decades. In order to scan it, it needed to be converted from “folded” to “rolled,” otherwise it won’t feed through the scanner. This is not a problem; there are several techniques that will safely flatten out old, brittle, folded paper like this. Some people like to iron paper; my own preference, visible here, is to hang the sheet in a bathroom and run a good hot shower. The paper is permitted to get slightly damp; this softens the paper and undoes the decades of folding. The paper is then rolled around a cardboard mailing tube. The end result is that the paper goes from complex curvature to simple curvature, and feeds smoothly through a large format scanner. The sheet has undergone the flattening process, with scanning to occur soon.
In this case, though, something further and dire might need to be done. I don;t know yet whether the scanning company can scan something this long, and at 300 DPI, it’s something that can’t be processed with most image programs (there is a limit just shy of 30,000 pixels, or ten feet at 300 DPI). if they *can* scan it, then I hope to have them chop the digital image into two; if they can’t scan it… I’ll probably slice the paper into two. Not something I normally approve of, but there is a *wide* gap in the paper between views, so the diagram itself will not be at risk, and the value of having the image scanned and immortalized it probably more important than having a giant intact sheet of rolled-up paper.
Note industry standard scale reference near the bottom.
Putin’s hilarious explanation is that Russia is liberating the Ukrainian people from evil overlords. I’m not sure how this helps:
That is, admittedly, a hell of an image. I’m honestly a bit surprised that with all that damage the apartment building is still standing, though I imagine it will have to come down. Add that to Russias reparations bill, I suppose.
I’ve always figured that a Molotov cocktail would be minimally useful against an armored vehicle. Sure, it’s liquid fire, but it’s not that much when you consider it’s spread over perhaps several square years of several inches of steel armor.
But then there’ s *this:*
Reasonably certain it got a little warm in there.
UPDATE: Original video removed for some reason. Why? Dunno. One possibility: like so many videos and photos… *maybe* it’s not actually from the current conflict, but from something else. Hard to tell. However, here’s a copy:
Over the past day or two, lots of reports have been made about a single Ukrainian MiG-29 fighter pilot who has shot down five or six Russian fighters. It’s a great story with a couple problems that boil down to: “fog of war.” Adding to the problem of determining just what the frak is going on is the fact that while there is footage of some of these supposed aerial victories… they might well be computer generated simulations. Some of the combat simulators available to be played on standard home computer equipment produce footage so realistic that even at full resolution and on large screens they’re a little hard to see as fake; scale them down and blur them a bit and make them look like crappy cell phone footage, and the digital artifacts are largely gone.
*Could* there be a Ukrainian ace prowling the skies? Sure. It’s certainly a target rich environment. Look at World War II… the highest scoring aces were on the Axis side, because their skies were *filled* with Allied pilots with relatively low experience. But *is* there such a pilot? Who the frak knows. If the war ends in a week with Putin strung up in Red Square, a complete Russian withdrawal from Ukraine and a serious international tribunal that investigates every last bullet fired, we might still never know for sure. But if the Ghost serves as an enduring source of morale and pride for the Ukrainians… then the myth will never die.
From the already-terminated once, soon to be terminated again Twitter account “Defiant L’s,” which posts screenshots of hypocritical Tweeters, comes this masterpiece regarding the need for assault rifles:
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) February 25, 2022
Related:
I learn to use #Kalashnikov and prepare to bear arms. It sounds surreal as just a few days ago it would never come to my mind. Our #women will protect our soil the same way as our #men. Go #Ukraine! 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/UbF4JRGlcy
— Kira Rudik (@kiraincongress) February 25, 2022
